Patient safety becomes priority for NHS IT

The NHS National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) has worked with Connecting for Health to build a rigorous system of safety checks which may, if necessary, delay product release, a conference has heard.

Clive Flashman, head of the national learning and reporting system at the NPSA, outlined extensive work done to a conference in London this week. This included the formation of a high level safety committee which must approve products for release.

Asked what implications this had for the local service providers charged with implementing new IT around the NHS, he replied: “The implication is that their products may come out late. If it’s delayed by the safety committee, it’s going to be late. But what are they going to moan about? That they would have released an unsafe product?”

He gave an account of the agency’s involvement with the national programme stretching back to an approach made by the NPSA’s former chairman, Lord Hunt, also a former health minister responsible for IT, who pressed the case for getting more safety expertise into the programme.

Flashman said a high level safety review was completed in April 2004 which resulted in a report that gave “more Cs than Bs” to the programme for its consideration of safety. It found the programme had not really been addressing safety in “an explicit, proactive, structured and robust manner.”

After the report, though, he said: “They wanted to do something about it and wanted us to be involved. We worked with them in driving a safety management approach.”

The aims were, he said, to develop IT systems which really help to facilitate the safety agenda; to provide suppliers with an easy-to-use and robust safety management system and to provide trusts with and assurance and clear guidance on the action they needed to take to ensure that systems are deployed in an effective and safe manner.”

He continued: “A number of groups were set up and there is a formal process before any product is signed off.”

The process, he said, had teeth and vendors – whoever they were – were not allowed to make a system live unless it had gone through the approval process. The process was, he added, also linked into the topmost clinical leaders in the programme.

The work is ongoing, Flashman emphasised, with NPSA people seconded to the national programme and a drive to embed safety awareness within the whole programme, at every stage of development and implementation.

He was candid about the challenge. “It’s trying to convince some of these people, particularly IT specialists, that the whole journey of building a system is not just an IT issue, it’s a change management issue.”

Whatever the issues, however, Flashman supported the case for the national programme. “It’s about being joined up – getting the right information on to the right people at the right time to make the right decisions,” he said.